razzimatazz

Being on the surface adds a lot of value for short trips in a tram (or similar). To reach the subway takes 2-4 minutes of travel down to platform level and back up. To cross the car lane to the tram station in Zurich takes 10-30s if you see the tram coming or read the digital signage, and a few minutes later you can be at your intended destination. Zurich has of course large parking garages, and if you bring your car in to the city you would leave it there and be able to hop around on the trams & buses, taking only a few minutes between your different shopping and eating destinations. I also think as a wealthy car driver you can differentiate yourself from the poor public-transport-dependents by choosing to stand on the tram, showing off your high-end branded shopping bags.

Enjoyed reading this (perhaps because I agree with it), and matching it to my 15 years of (paid) life in a chair. It stands out to me that every paragraph/point includes highlighting the situations where it make sense to forgo that point - and hints at the risks this could bring. i.e. the balancing act of software development.

What is perhaps missing is a nice general viewpoint on how to approach testing, with 50 (man-)years of experience.

I feel like a crux of the author's argument (and not deeply discussed), is the process where increasing population and density leads to higher wages for the highly educated.

We could imagine new companies moving to the area, with their complete team in tow. This creates a new opportunity for me to jump ship in return for a raise. My employer then has some incentive to 'steal' someone from elsewhere and may offer higher wages. The net result being little change, but higher wages for us both.

Is that enough to feed into the loop that keeps housing costs high?

Maybe the key step is the arrival of new employers, which bring the credit and wealth that soaks up the space created by any new housing. Some employers, and those employees not paid enough to keep up will choose to exit. But those spaces will be filled by the highly-motivated quickly. Meanwhile the relatively poor will continually suffer, there is nothing created that satisfies them.

So, dear leaders, build new housing but restrict employers, to make the bell curve that matches the people you want to populate your city.

in crazy liberal Europe you see plenty of IT jobs advertised as 80-100%, i.e. potential for the candidate to negotiate a 4 vs 5 day work week. (examples https://www.jobs.ch/en/vacancies/information-technology-tele... )

My colleagues in Switzerland who took this path were either fathers that directed that extra day to their child, or people with a vibe for the outdoors and exploring . It gave an impression of financial stability and level-headedness in my mind. And demonstrated that these people were employable and valuable enough to contribute good value over 4 days per week.

So I think it is a good look for an employer to have these approaches in place. As downsides for the rest of us, yes meetings would sometimes need to be delayed and certain crunch periods had the awkward obstacle of a 3-day weekend for some team members, but I hope the 80% employee demonstrates flexibility to help hit deliveries when necessary.

I like this, I think this sort of investment gives you(me) a foundation for happiness feelings to sit upon. Which otherwise can deflate quickly if it comes at the end of an unproductive(ineffective) day

I think I define them in a big blurry overlap. Somewhere in there is the guy who leaves the communal kitchen in a mess because he is too busy, and the countless people who wont prepare properly for a meeting or respond to admin style requests.

I guess those form the category of selfish-effective and selfish-productive people.

There is a thread of a story in the article that is interesting but leaves a lot of 'what if?' questions - could this author have found something that fit between the bro-culture-10x sales targets and a magazine editor-change-isnt-always-good?

How come when he interviewed at a dozen more start ups at the end of the story, he didn't find himself in an interview where he could discuss the 10x-start-up culture downfalls?

Or maybe that middle road is extremely rare.

I've also followed this approach a lot, yet I still find myself searching for the right ways to format it and the right ways to 'promote' pieces of my docs to real documentation or public notes. Cue highlighting with bold, red text, etc.

Not actually sure how people design a solution to something without this style or something near to it... whiteboard session with yourself?

I can think of two directions we could go from where we are - perhaps Authorative Media: a return to the government telling us everything we need to know? Very dark, but a "government influencer" could still work..

And perhaps more positive - Truthful Media: Information generated by people, in the 'open source' way that you can fully trust. Hard to believe, but almost necessary. A blockchain of real information sources and trusted information processors (aka influencers), who give opinions that can be traced back to facts.

I think that perhaps glamour and fantasy will always win out - reality is boring and human nature wont get us to choose facts when fantasy gets our attention much more

I'm never going to rule out the candidate without online profiles, but it would have been a nice way to get some confirmation or another perspective on what I see in the CV. Without access to your profiles I'll just have to work a bit harder to get references or evaluate how truthful your backstory is.

In NZ my own linkedin is perhaps enough to help with that. Perhaps if you aren't using linkedin yourself, you don't understand how it can be used against you, or how it is helping other candidates? (just thinking..)

Excellent link. Any pitfalls in that calculator? I feel like it covers 90% of the (financial) factors even in a non-US situation.

This is why I introduced the "Copy & Paste Error Scorecard" to my (small) team. Everybody manages to give away points from time to time. More serious points could be scored for mistakes getting as far as Git, but the best points are the ones it takes about 4-5 minutes of going "huh?" to spot. Its nice to remember that copy-and-paste tooling is a privilege, not a programmers' right.

And while I'm here, My favorite technique for reducing these mistakes - is using "highlight occurrences" in the IDE, with a nice bright color ; click the cursor on a variable or method call, all matching uses jump out at you. This gives a great visual pattern when working in copy-pasted code blocks.

Do we really need to know, in non-subjective way? In a 1000-person company, how many persons have their performance calculated in a non-subjective and vaguely accurate way?

It must surely only be in sales - where sales volume is a great measure, and I think sales people accept that they are allowed and expected to learn the cut-throat techniques to gameify the situation and win. If we want to force the corresponding personality traits that make such measurement reasonable onto developers - then OK I think story points achieved (aka velocity) is an equivalent measure we can take.

An experienced twisted senior dev would know how to maximise their score there, and make a junior dev look atrocious in comparison, but if its OK for sales then its OK for devs?

(my actual opinion - being subjective and relying on the opinion of good managers is fine. The developer personality matches this.)

I would (and expect of my peers too) only value the donut-bringing as a minor strength compared to their technical skills and interactions with me. Which I think makes a little game-ifying ok: If someone wants to make a conscious effort to be the donut guy instead of the never-say-hi-in-the-hallway guy, they've earned a few points.

The amount of points to award is the tricky point, maybe it depends on company culture. How much value does the lovable team player bring, how much value does the awkward quietly-fix-anything person bring?

Fully agreeing with your points here. The perspective I think that hasn't been mentioned is present here in Switzerland - where they make 'Jura' brand superautomatic coffee machines, and culture is such that in any establishment that is not specialty-coffee focused, you will be served your coffee by a robot. You will still pay top dollar for the middle-aged woman to walk over and press the button for Cafe or Cappuccino, but it will probably taste like burnt rubbish.

To me in particular, any hope of a quality standard of the milk aspect of the coffee is lost completely.

But returning to your points - The 'Jura' standard of coffee is 'good enough', and only not good enough recently to hip-swiss or expats living here. The standard of coffee expected from a barista is significantly higher - I imagine the theoretical Jura coffee machine that can do this would cost an insane amount to build, and to maintain and calibrate.

That is, until we get a real AI powered robot that can optimize and adjust its technique to what is happening in the cup and in the milk jug.